Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  Part IV

  I Buy a Motorbike

  20

  Transit to Turkey

  In 1991 I celebrated my menopause by buying a motorbike. I’d always wanted one. I crept off to Wimbledon and took some lessons, and a month later passed the test on a hired bike little bigger than a moped. After that, whenever I was in a car on a winding country road, I would dream that I was gliding round the corners on a steeply banked bike. I began secretly reading Motorcycle News. I knew exactly what I wanted. At forty-seven, I didn’t see myself crouched over the tank of a Japanese racer or on a butched-up off-road bike; I wanted a powerful long-legged touring machine that would allow me to sit up straight and would keep on going for ever. A bike to go places on and to have adventures on.

  One afternoon, just back from a trip to call on some Egyptian companies, I found myself standing outside BMW Park Lane. I knew little about motorbikes apart from titbits half-remembered from Motorcycle News, but I walked boldly in and up to the biggest bike, a steel-grey BMW R100RT – a massive creature with fairings, slanting windscreen and an engine that looked as if it belonged in an industrial museum.

  ‘Have you got any of these in stock?’ I asked the salesman, trying to sound knowledgeable.

  ‘Several. What colour do you want?’

  ‘I’ll take the grey,’ said I in my gruffest voice. ‘And I’ll be back tomorrow to pick it up. Oh, and I’ll have a helmet as well. Extra large.’

  Next day at 4 p.m. I returned. Terrified. I’d never been on anything bigger than the tiny bike on which I had taken my test a year earlier and had no idea how to ride a bike weighing the best part of half a ton. The salesman stood there with a smile on his face waiting for me to ride off.

  ‘You’re OK with this, are you?’

  ‘No problem, I’m cool,’ said I, hoping that the sweat patches on my shirt weren’t visible. The BMW was 1,000 cc, ten times as powerful as my test bike. Riding it out into Park Lane rush-hour traffic was a scary prospect. The salesman showed me the controls; I fired up the bike and gingerly steered the Beast out of the garage and off down the bus lane. The traffic chaos of Hyde Park Corner loomed up ahead. The Beast didn’t shrug. It took me gently round the bends and as I opened the throttle a touch and banked into Belgrave Square I could feel my excitement growing.

  That weekend I drove it up to Norfolk and back, and found that despite its size and power it was as sweet and docile as a pony. I was enchanted by the physicality of riding a bike – you did it all by weight. And the sense of freedom. This was what open-cockpit flying must have been like. Riding a bike, you become a different driver. You start to use senses that are asleep in a car. When I got off the motorway and on to an empty road and felt the Beast bank and swoop into bends with the grace of a butterfly, that gave me a feeling I had never had in a car.

  Another dream had been a journey across Europe, not for sightseeing but for the sake of the journey. Anyone who asked ‘What’s the point of that?’ wouldn’t understand any more than I could fathom why people run marathons. The weekend after buying the bike, I set off for Istanbul. Guislaine understood. She worried but she understood. We talked about her flying out to join me in Istanbul but didn’t want to tempt providence by making firm plans in case I didn’t make it.

  I had intended to leave on Monday morning, but the European weather forecast – ‘France very stormy: heavy rain accompanied by winds as high as 100 kph’ – meant that I fled down the M2 for Calais at daybreak on an October Sunday hoping to stay ahead of the storm. I had yet to ride in the rain and wasn’t looking forward to it. The weather and I hit France at the same time. I arrived in Nancy that night, twelve hours after leaving Chelsea, exhausted from a day fighting gale-force winds and vicious rain.

  But for a few moments that afternoon the rain had stopped and a pale autumnal sun had come out long enough to dry the road as we – the Beast and I – came down the Meuse Valley. I had tried thinking of the bike as a ‘she’, but it just didn’t work. It was about as feminine as Walter Matthau, so the Beast it remained. My heart danced. The road curved gently along the valley, and as the surface dried, the bike began to find its footing round the corners. I even found myself in the middle of the Liège–Rome vintage car rally, and for an hour the Beast and I glided along as the poplars whoosh-whooshed by, escorted by Delahayes and Frazer-Nashes.

  I had no exact route as I wasn’t sure how far I’d be able to go each day. I had imagined that about four hours in the saddle would be enough, but a bike-riding neighbour told me that he had once covered 500 miles in a day. We’d see. Istanbul was well over 2,000 miles away; I had two weeks to get there and back, and I wanted a couple of days’ rest in Istanbul. I would have to average further than London to Edinburgh each day.

  I decided on the northern route out, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and then dropping down through my old friend Romania – where I hoped this time my visa would be honoured – and finally on to Bulgaria and over the mountains into Turkey. I intended to take the southern route back, across Greece and through Italy, using the ferry across the Adriatic to bypass a Yugoslavia torn by civil war.

  Next morning I woke to the sound of cars splashing through water in the street. The dawn sky over Nancy was thick with rain clouds and the wind still moaned. I contemplated giving up: No one apart from Guislaine knows I’m doing this. I must be mad. Why don’t I just go home and get warm and dry? but I decided to continue. I would give it another day, and if it was still hellish then I’d creep quietly back to England. With some dread I put my wet biking over-clothes back on and nosed the Beast out into the rain.

  Dodging through the mist-shrouded mountains of the Vosges, I found the views dramatic and the driving terrifying. On a bike the front brake is the one that stops you and has all the power, the back being an auxiliary. This works well in the dry. In the wet, if you hit the front brake while you are going round a corner you can send yourself over a precipice.

  Things got worse when we crossed the border into Germany and found ourselves sucked into the autobahn system bypassing Freiburg. The road was a narrow two lanes each way with a slippery concrete surface and traffic in the slow lane going at 75 mph. Overtaking in these conditions was hard. I discovered that a big truck creates a quarter-mile wake of turbulence which builds to a climax as you pull out to pass it, and just after you do, you get sucked the other way and buffeted by a crosswind.

  Then it changed. The rain stopped, the sun came out, the road dried and we were in the Black Forest. Bikers from all over Europe come to ride here just for the fun of it. It was a strange but gratifying feeling to find myself part of a new fellowship. As big bikers pass on the open road they salute each other. At first I found myself returning their salutes with a kind of royal wave, until I realised how gauche this made me seem. The appropriate acknowledgement was a two-inch lift of the outside hand and an upward flick of the two outside fingers. Lunch in the weak sun by Lake Konstanz, and then once more the rain came down. This set the pattern for the next few days: just as I was wondering how much more punishment I could take, everything would come right and there would be an hour or two of biking ecstasy.

  I avoided motorways where I could. They make for boring riding at best, and even where they pass through scenery as beautiful as that between Innsbruck and Vienna, you don’t have the spare concentration to admire the views. My rule became that when it was wet I stayed on the motorways and covered the miles, and when it cleared up I sought out the small roads and the mountain passes.

  I left the autobahns for the Alpine road up through the ski resorts of Lech and Zurs to the Arlberg Pass and down to St Anton. The Arlberg is the watershed of Europe. To the west of it everything drains into the Rhine and the North Sea; to the east everything flows down into the Danube and the Black Sea. The sparse traffic was left behind like sweet wrappings. The bike rose and fell like a lapwing on the long mountain bends. Brake, change down, bank to the right, change down again, let the bike almost fall side
ways as the bend tightens, just a touch of throttle to pick her up before she goes over, now some more throttle to bring her upright, and then over and bank to the left for the next bend. Perhaps the best moments were those instants on long S-bends when I flowed out of one curve and brought the bike up and into the opposite bank for the next. It’s close to the feeling of slaloming down a field of fresh powder snow.

  If those were the high points, things didn’t get much worse than the four stomach-clenching hours from the Hungarian border at Nadlac to Sibiu in Romania, where I hoped to spend the night. There weren’t many private cars on the roads in Romania. The traffic consisted of locally made diesel lorries, which sputtered and coughed and left bits behind them in the road, agricultural machinery, horse-drawn wagons and weary peasants plodding from one village to the next.

  The main road was just wide enough for a tractor to overtake a hay wagon. In the rain its already slippery surface was made worse by a top dressing of diesel oil and donkey droppings from the wagons. This produced a surface on which riding something with two wheels required skills which I was not sure I had yet learned. When night fell it became worse. The tractors and carts had no lights, and my normally powerful headlight wasn’t much use through a smear of mud.

  But when I arrived I felt like a star. There was a hotel in Sibiu, the Imperator Romaniul, which Nico Ceausescu, the dictator’s son, had had restored. Every surface was marble or mahogany. The Beast, a rarity in Romania, was parked in a place of honour under the main hotel canopy and soon attracted a crowd of around fifty. The old-fashioned architecture of its great finned engine was something they could appreciate.

  Next morning another crowd had gathered. I felt like a medieval knight preparing for battle as I slipped on helmet, over-trousers and gloves, stowed my luggage in the panniers and inserted the folded map in the transparent cover of the tank bag. The more knowledgeable kept up a commentary: ‘Now he’s turning on the petrol. Look at those carburettors.’ The Beast’s star quality was a blessing. There were between 200 and 300 cars in the queues at the infrequent petrol stations. I drove up to the front each time, and instead of the other drivers objecting, as they had every right to, they got out of their cars to admire the Beast.

  By the time I reached Bucharest, the rioting miners who had been disrupting the city for the two previous weeks had gone home and I was able to photograph the bike in front of the blackened parliament building until President Iliescu’s motorcade came out; the guards, who had been quarrelling about who was going to sit on the Beast and have their picture taken, hurriedly shooed me away. That night, after five days on the road, I reached the Black Sea at Varna in Bulgaria. I had crossed Europe, sea to sea.

  All along the coast were neat white hotels set in lush gardens and a shoreline of rocky coves and sandy beaches. I biked to dinner in the next village just in T-shirt and jeans – no helmet, no gloves, no jacket. I had a wonderful illicit feeling of freedom with the wind on my cheeks and bare arms for the first time on the trip. It was here that Ovid had been exiled for eight years of moaning after he wrote Ars Amatoria. What was he on about? Next morning I saw his point. A great storm had rolled in from the Black Sea. I looked out with a mixture of excitement and terror and was thankful that I only had 300 miles to cover that day to reach Istanbul.

  Bikers develop a blind person’s sensitivity to road surfaces – the slipperiness of the white line in the middle, the join left by a road mender, the qualities of grip of different types of tarmac and concrete. This new skill was severely tested when I took the shorter, inland route to the border through the mountains. The road ran through forest and over heath, the surface varying from leaf pulp to sheep droppings. In places the road had collapsed over a cliff edge, and the Beast and I had to pick our way over the debris. The cold was intense. I had stopped in a bus shelter in Varna to put on a sweater. I hid from the rain under a cliff to put on a second. By the time I reached the Turkish border at the high mountain pass beyond Malko Tarnovo I had on five layers and the noise of chattering teeth echoed around my helmet. I sang to keep my spirits up, but that fogged the visor.

  There was a two-hour delay at the border while Turkish officials sipped tea and bullied Bulgarians on their way to Istanbul. I felt as if I were entering the Ottoman empire. I was sent to a special room to get a visa; a mustachioed officer flicked through my passport and then left the room with it. After fifteen minutes I asked where he had taken it. ‘Toilet.’ I hoped he had enough paper and was relieved when, after another twenty minutes, he brought it back with its pages intact and gave me a visa.

  I often thought during the journey out that things couldn’t get worse. Each time I was soon proved wrong. I still don’t like to remember the four hours from the border to Istanbul. Although the road was narrow, it was the main artery connecting Turkey with Europe and a thundering procession of speeding trucks. The rain never let up while the cold and wind increased. Water had penetrated my over-clothes, and I felt as if I was sitting in cold rice pudding. Each time a truck swept past in the opposite direction it was like standing on the edge of a station platform as an express went through. I was hit by a wall of solid air and tossed about like a canoe in the rapids.

  At last I was in the suburbs of Istanbul and after the buffeting I had received relieved to be in slower-moving rush-hour traffic, even Turkish rush-hour traffic. I had no idea where I was until suddenly the sparkle of light on water popped up on the right – the Bosphorus. I could get my bearings and orientate myself. I had biked from the other side of the English Channel to within sight of Asia. Then it was easy, past the six minarets of the Blue Mosque, the Galata Bridge and up the hill to the Pera Palace Hotel, which was built in 1892 to accommodate the first passengers from the Orient Express, and hadn’t changed since Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in Room 411.

  I was received with courtesy by Hakan at the hotel desk when I stumbled in dripping, steaming and stinking in bike suit and helmet, trailed by a flunkey carrying my pannier bags. I had no booking – to have booked before I knew I would make it to Istanbul might have tempted providence – but was escorted up in the 1892 lift, the only lift I know with a sofa in it, to a magnificent room on the top floor with Turkish rugs on the floor, a marble bathroom and a view over the Golden Horn.

  Next morning I met Guislaine off the plane from London and we had a weekend of bazaars and mosques and little fish restaurants. It rained most of the time but we didn’t care. The Beast stayed in the Pera Palace garage, apart from a trip to the Blue Mosque to pose for photographs. Guislaine was worried when I told her how bad conditions had been on the journey out.

  ‘How awful. Just looking at you I can see you’ve suffered. You must have been miserable.’

  That made me think.

  ‘You know, I was tired, cold, uncomfortable and often terrified, but I was never unhappy. I was never miserable. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it all, but it was a great thing to do, and the bits that were good were fantastic.’

  The next morning I headed off at dawn for the return trip into the obligatory thunderstorm. I felt like a refugee from the Book of Job. But surely nothing could hurt me now. We, the Beast and I, had even survived a dust storm in Bulgaria. Hadn’t we seen it all? Not quite. The storm leaving Istanbul was so violent that it brought an avalanche of rocks and mud down from the mountains on to the motorway, which had to be closed and traffic diverted to the coast road. This was flooded a foot deep. How could we get through this? I put my head down, engaged second gear and prayed. Clouds of hissing steam as brown slush washed over the hot engine, mud on the visor, bow waves from passing trucks, but the Beast chugged through without a hiccup. We lost the horn though, its Teutonic klaxon reduced thereafter to a mere burp.

  And that was the last trial. It was as if I was being tested, and the rest of the way home was a reward for surviving. The sun came out and the wind dropped. The Beast and I coasted along the Aegean, swept up through the Pindus Mountains on a road that seemed to flo
at in the sky, and came down to the Ionian Sea on the other side of Greece. I took breakfast in an olive grove and then a ferry trip up a tranquil Adriatic as thunder rumbled over warring Yugoslavia. There followed a night in Stresa on Lake Maggiore and a pink dawn as I crossed the roof of Europe, the Simplon Pass. That was the best of them all, two hours of swooping bends that danced around the flanks of the mountain.

  The plan had been to stop for the night in Paris and then drive on to Calais the next morning, but the adrenalin was so high when I came down from the Simplon that I didn’t want to stop. We cruised past Paris at dusk on the Périphérique and kept going.

  Seventeen hours after leaving Lake Maggiore, the Beast and I skidded on to the midnight boat from Calais. At 3 a.m. we banked gently into a deserted Parliament Square after twenty hours in the saddle and 800 miles on the road in one day. Three more to go.

  Along the Embankment we were slaloming from side to side in triumph, Europe twice crossed and 5,000 miles behind us. I had my visor up and was singing with joy while the tears rolled down my face. I hoped a policeman would stop me.

  ‘Now, now, sir. Going somewhere, are we?’

  ‘No, officer, I’ve been.’

  Shortly after an account of this trip appeared in the Sunday Telegraph I received the letter below (the names have been changed):

  Nov 25th 1991

  Dear Mr Morland,

  I ask forgiveness for burdening you with this letter, yet I write it with some compulsion for your article on ‘The Beast’ in the Sunday Telegraph 24 November opened my eyes in a manner which has given me a considerable degree of solace.

  My son Paul, a Metropolitan policeman aged 28, of Bow Street and then Heathrow, also owned a much beloved BMW R100RS bought from Coopers of Park Lane, after having three or four of the same make previously. He had considerable experience and had done two Police motorcycle courses. Like you, he was lyrical in his attitude towards his machine and enjoyed every minute riding it, servicing it, or even standing gazing adoringly at it.